Court: RapidShare doesn’t need to filter user uploads

RapidShare does not need to start filtering uploads over copyright concerns, …

Yesterday, the online storage locker RapidShare announced that it triumphed in its appeal over copyright holders who demanded that the service take more steps to control online infringement. Because RapidShare does not make uploaded files publicly available (those who upload them can control access), the court found that it could not be held liable for distribution and that running filename filters on all uploads would produce too many false positives.

It's a huge win for the site, which suffered a major setback in the case before a Düsseldorf court back in 2008. In that decision, the court found for rightsholders, and it looked as though RapidShare would have to start prescreening all uploads by file name, IP address, and other measures to preempt infringement.

RapidShare appealed from the Landesgericht (Regional court) Düsseldorf to the Oberlandesgericht (Appeals court) Düsseldorf, which overturned the lower court's decision. According to the new ruling, RapidShare cannot be held responsible for actions of third parties, since it forces people to choose how their content should be distributed rather than making it automatically available to the public.

In addition, the appeals court took aim at several filtering schemes. Blocking all files of a certain type (such as RAR files) was deemed inappropriate, since a file type has no bearing on the legality of an upload. Scanning by IP address was also tossed, because numerous people can use a single IP address. File name filtering tells you nothing about the contents of a file, so that was tossed. Even content scanning was problematic, as the court noted that this would just lead to encrypted files. Besides, even if you could know that a file was copyrighted, it could still be a legal "private backup" not distributed to anyone else.

Given all these problems, the appeals court reversed the earlier judgment. Christian Schmid, who started RapidShare, said, "We are very happy about the judgment. The court has confirmed that RapidShare is not responsible for the contents of files uploaded by its users. The judgment shows that attempts to denounce our business model as illegal will not be successful in the long run. With its 1-click file-hosting model, RapidShare responds to legitimate interests of its users and will continue to do so in the future."

Its nice to see the court side on the people for once.....still until the CP/IP conglomerates give in to reasonable sharing(non money making attempts) of the stuff they make copyright rules and laws and discussions will be bipolar as all hell....

though i understand the view point of copyright holders i don't think filtering would help prevent piracy. pirates are always two steps ahead and they would of easily found a way to still upload pirated material to rapidshare. glad to see rapidshare win this case since i use it alot

a German court with a sensible ruling that shows some understanding of technology? Wow look outside is the sky already falling?

this would only be that amazing if it happened in a US Court, since some countries have obviously not lost all their common sense. I sense a increasing in bribing...i mean lobbying by the **AA's coming for politicians in Germany

I just wish they would permaban users who upload content known to be copyrighted. I've lost count of how many takedown notices we've had to file against them for my wife's books. and most of those uploaded included the copyright notice in the upload, not like it wasn't obvious that the work was not under copyright. There's no way they can say "I didn't know".

I'm all for common carriers having the protection they do, I just wish they would hold their users more accountable for their actions, instead of the current 'slap on wrist, "don't let us catch you doing that again" <wink nod>' approach most of them seem to currently employ.

The problem with 'reasonable sharing' is that what is reasonable varies widely depending on the perspective. For an author that is putting in thousands of hours to research and write a book, reasonable is getting paid their royalties. For a teenager with a 'gotta get em all' mentality and no budget, reasonable is 'free'. To someone who actually needs to read the work, reasonable might be a e-version that's discounted to like half the price of a dead-tree edition.

For most authors I know, 'reasonable' is sharing something with one or two close friends (as you would a physical book) so they can decide if they like the work or the author, and might perhaps buy their own copy. it's not 'put it up on the internet for anyone to download for free'.

If an author or publisher wants to put their book up for free on their own site, that's their right. For authors with a bunch of books, that can work out pretty well (e.g. Baen free library).. but it's harder to convince an author with just a single book so far to just give it away in the hopes it might increase sales. But in either case that decision should rest in the hands of the author/publisher, not some random torrent user

I don't think I've ever been linked to non-copyright-infringing material on RapidShare. I think that the court made the right decision -- naive filtering won't help, and the responsibility for the content should be on the uploaders -- but I wouldn't be surprised if other rulings and other jurisdictions eventually force it to take some action.

I just wish they would permaban users who upload content known to be copyrighted.

They would just create new accounts, and as the court found, it wouldn't be fair to try to ban IP addresses because multiple people can be found behind a given IP address, especially dynamic ones.

Basically rights holders have to find ways to encourage those who are willing to buy the works to still buy them. I believe most responsible people do buy what they value. There's no way to keep people that want to share from sharing, because it's just too easy to move bits.

I don't think you need to worry about "a teenager with a 'gotta get em all' mentality" representing many lost sales for your wife's book.

Was a court case really needed in this situation?? I don't see how something that is not publicly available should be filtered by a company that is just storing for private use of the uploader...

In a sense, RapidShare has outsourced the search part of their service to third parties. Since search is a low-bandwidth activity, it's not a big deal if the search request goes to some website that's served up from halfway across the world. Once a link to the desired file is found, the user can rapidly download the file from RapidShare's servers located in copyright-enforcing countries (i.e. first world countries with excellent connectivity).

That is, most files are very much not just for private use. RapidShare uses "security through obscurity" to keep them private, and relies on others to break that weak security or index the files through crowdsourcing.

this would only be that amazing if it happened in a US Court, since some countries have obviously not lost all their common sense.

Yeah but at least the US has a long standing and strong legal tradition of "Free Speech" and "Fair Use", although the second gets hollowed out. Compare that to German judges who at the best of times would be backward-looking and not really tech savvy, the fact that Germans like to regulate everything, and combine this with the German tradition of "Everything that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden" and you have a recipe for disaster. It is for example really dangerous to host a forum in Germany since you can be made liable for every post on your forum. You are in effect legally forced to review each post. Oh and many tools like port sniffers that could be used to hacking sites are forbidden as well. Nobody cares that they can also be used for legitimate reasons. I don't even think that this is done because of lobbying or malice. I simply suppose that those people have no idea what the inter tubes are for.

RapidShare's business model revolves around selling premium accounts. They do so by limiting the file size and free download limit. And the strongest incentive to go for a premium account is content of questionable legality.

I'm sure there are a thousand legal uses of RapidShare. As of yet, I have to find one.

No you are not. But you have to take action once being made aware of a legal issue. The situation in Germany is not great, especially thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung but not as bad as you've described it.

According to the new ruling, RapidShare cannot be held responsible for actions of third parties, since it forces people to choose how their content should be distributed rather than making it automatically available to the public.

As much as I'm not a fan of most copyright holders, this defense seems pretty lousy to me. Just because people have to choose to make what they upload available to the public doesn't mean that they can't, won't, or don't.

According to the new ruling, RapidShare cannot be held responsible for actions of third parties, since it forces people to choose how their content should be distributed rather than making it automatically available to the public.

As much as I'm not a fan of most copyright holders, this defense seems pretty lousy to me. Just because people have to choose to make what they upload available to the public doesn't mean that they can't, won't, or don't.

But because it is the choice of the uploader to choose how it gets shared, that makes them responsible for if they share something that they shouldn't be. Just because some of its users use the service illegally doesn't mean that the service itself is illegal.

If we keep on this trail where services like RapidShare or YouTube cannot be held liable for their users actions, we may kiss goodbye copyright laws for the smaller, low resource right-holders. We are effectively stripping from these any possibility of protecting their work. None whatsoever.

What confuses me greatly is this notion that a service like content sharing can be provided to a community, said service can generate money through ad revenues or other direct or indirect means, and still be completely removed of any responsibility whatsoever regarding the actions of its users and the actual content.

I can understand the technical difficulties behind all this. But something is deeply rotten in all this content sharing service model that is generating large amounts of money on the backs on copyright infringement. As a small, low budget, right-holder, I honestly do not see how I can possibly protect my copyrights. Effectively rulings like these are saying I can't. And at the same time it is telling everyone else, they can keep bringing in their content sharing services because the only thing they need to worry about is depositing the big fat ad revenue check at the end of the month. Oh, and the users are being told piracy is only starting.

And this is why, I really, really, look forward to ACTA and its hopeful implementation in Europe and why I agree with laws like the UK Digital Economy Law. Screw the pirate.

I don't think I've ever been linked to non-copyright-infringing material on RapidShare.

I've used it to share large files (photo archives/home movies/college notes) with family. This was primarily when email attachments and inbox sizes were pretty constrained. I didn't use Rapidshare-style services a lot, or for a long time, but they were really useful when they were newer.

No you are not. But you have to take action once being made aware of a legal issue. The situation in Germany is not great, especially thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung but not as bad as you've described it.

Hmm thats a rapidly changing situation. Currently wikipedia wouldn't be possible if it was legally a German company. If you have been made aware of the situation for example, you have the obligation to further on check that it doesn't happen again. In other words if someone complains about a wikipage a court can force you to check new entries to the same topic from now on. And as I have understood it that was even worse in 2008 when the court in Hamburg effectively ruled that through opening a wiki you took possession of all entries.

No wonder that Germany is a desert in the web 2.0 environment, I wouldn't know a company that is not a blatant. All I can say is Americans can be lucky that their founding fathers added the free speech chapter to their constitution.

Oh and Abmahnungen must be one of the most perverted legal instruments invented. That I can force someone to pay me money because he didn't add an owner's name/address in the impressum even if it doesn't even concern me is beyond ridiculous.

I would argue that most of the content on RapidShare contains copyrighted content based on what I know and have seen (no, I can't actually prove this or offer 'real' numbers).

However I have used sites like this (there must be hundreds now) for legitimate purposes in the past as it was extremely easy to share large files (not copyrighted material - think memory dumps and other files required for troubleshooting).

Even if sites like this didn't exist though, anyone can share what they have directly with anyone else they choose. It's quite the pickle. Increasing enforcement and punishment is not the answer either - ruining peoples lives over sharing luxury items such as entertainment is ridiculous. As someone else has already pointed out, look how well the government is able to regulate drugs. Physical products that cross our borders and are produced domestically every day. Anybody need something? I could have it in 10 minutes. The war on drugs is a disaster, a war on copyright would be an even bigger waste of money.

This ruling is legally sound. What it will do is uphold the law's role in business. The courts now have to pass a law allowing permanent bans on sharing media by people who have been found through due legal process to be uploading content for the sole purpose of having other people acquire that content without having to pay for it, and the precedent should be set for effective combating of "illegal" file sharing.

If we keep on this trail where services like RapidShare or YouTube cannot be held liable for their users actions, we may kiss goodbye copyright laws for the smaller, low resource right-holders. We are effectively stripping from these any possibility of protecting their work. None whatsoever.

Keep on this trail? This has been like this for years, nothing has changed. The fact is, services that's responsible for holding files are not responsible for what their users upload. For the same reason that storage units provider are not responsible for what their customers put in the units. There's no way around this. You can't fight this unless you're in a communist or some non-democratic country that does not respect freedoms. The only thing that can be done is informing those services of the copyrighted infringement. There's nothing you can do.

Marfig wrote:

What confuses me greatly is this notion that a service like content sharing can be provided to a community, said service can generate money through ad revenues or other direct or indirect means, and still be completely removed of any responsibility whatsoever regarding the actions of its users and the actual content.

If you're confused, let me explain it to you as clearly as I could.

The company provides a service. A service by itself is all they are responsible for. It has nothing to do with actual context of the content being uploaded to it.

Think about the postal office. They are providing a mailing service, they have absolutely nothing to do with that's inside the box or the envelope. They are responsible for getting that mail from point A to point B. That's what the content sharing service does, they let a person upload a file (mail), send a link (the actual file is on the server, mail truck), the destination person get the link (postman delivering) and download it off the link (getting the mail from mailbox). The ads are basically the stamps on the mail, they help pay for the delivery(servers-hosting) and the workers(company's employees) and the gas (bandwidth). The money the company gets has no direct relationship to the context of the files being uploaded to.

You can't force the postal office to open the email, so the same applies to the content sharing services. They are not allowed to look inside it. They can only store.

Here's where this ruling and what has to be done makes sense. The fact that when you upload a file to a site and it's defaulted to sharing to the public, that makes the service provider reasonably responsible since it's like dropping a mail into a public bin box, anybody can get to it and so can the postal workers. If the company sees that it's copyrighted, it's obligated to remove it and delete it as well as warning the user for illegal content and termination of their account. It's like looking at the return label and tell the shipper next time that they'll be banned from using the postal office for shipping illegal stuff.

The country should pass laws saying the the content sharing services must require registration of their users and default to private link share with a max numbers of link clicks (adjustable by users). So when a user upload, only private can be set and the user can send the links themselves to the people that wants the file. That puts the responsibility solely on the user who sent the link, not the service.

Marfig wrote:

I can understand the technical difficulties behind all this. But something is deeply rotten in all this content sharing service model that is generating large amounts of money on the backs on copyright infringement. As a small, low budget, right-holder, I honestly do not see how I can possibly protect my copyrights. Effectively rulings like these are saying I can't. And at the same time it is telling everyone else, they can keep bringing in their content sharing services because the only thing they need to worry about is depositing the big fat ad revenue check at the end of the month. Oh, and the users are being told piracy is only starting.

Read above but I want to say something else. The rulings like this are not saying that you can't protect the copyrights, it's just that you can't be the only one with protections. The service itself must be respected as well and they have the rights to not get sued for what the users do to their services.

The only thing is, the services should be mandated to switch to a much more restricted sharing model like I suggested. But unfortunately such mandating can only come from the laws itself, not the company.

Marfig wrote:

And this is why, I really, really, look forward to ACTA and its hopeful implementation in Europe and why I agree with laws like the UK Digital Economy Law. Screw the pirate.

Trust me, it won't work out the way you expect it to. What you're hoping for, the actual concepts of three strike rules and so on doesn't work. It won't do anything to the piracy, it has been around for centuries and it will never go away. What the purposed laws are doing are harming the innocent and restricting everybody's rights on the Internet. You are not promoting the right laws. The pirates will get around it.

What confuses me greatly is this notion that a service like content sharing can be provided to a community, said service can generate money through ad revenues or other direct or indirect means, and still be completely removed of any responsibility whatsoever regarding the actions of its users and the actual content.

I can understand the technical difficulties behind all this. But something is deeply rotten in all this content sharing service model that is generating large amounts of money on the backs on copyright infringement. As a small, low budget, right-holder, I honestly do not see how I can possibly protect my copyrights. Effectively rulings like these are saying I can't. And at the same time it is telling everyone else, they can keep bringing in their content sharing services because the only thing they need to worry about is depositing the big fat ad revenue check at the end of the month. Oh, and the users are being told piracy is only starting.

And this is why, I really, really, look forward to ACTA and its hopeful implementation in Europe and why I agree with laws like the UK Digital Economy Law. Screw the pirate.

Your confusion stems entirely from your misguided belief that copyright is an entitlement.

Quote:

If we keep on this trail where services like RapidShare or YouTube cannot be held liable for their users actions, we may kiss goodbye copyright laws for the smaller, low resource right-holders. We are effectively stripping from these any possibility of protecting their work. None whatsoever.

One can only hope. Copyrights are handed out far too liberally already.

You can bet your yearly salary that if this was in the US it wouldn't have been overturned. Our judges are retarded idiots who's knowledge of computers extends to that thing you move around your desk and click with to make "stuff" happen.

I just wish they would permaban users who upload content known to be copyrighted. I've lost count of how many takedown notices we've had to file against them for my wife's books.

Protection of copyright is difficult. But imo the most reasonable system is that the file sharing website take down the copyrighted material when requested. - The main difference between the RapidShare case and the Pirate Bay case imo was that RapidShare is willing to take down copyrighted material when informed. Some courts seem to be settling on this as a reasonable action by the file sharing service.

Quote:

I just wish they would hold their users more accountable for their actions, instead of the current 'slap on wrist, "don't let us catch you doing that again" <wink nod>' approach most of them seem to currently employ.

Punishment needs to fit the crime. How that will be determined is worked out in the courts. The current 'slap on wrist' as you put it, is probably all that can be done weighing the rights of the copyright holder and the user making the material available.

Quote:

The problem with 'reasonable sharing' is that what is reasonable varies widely depending on the perspective.

Of course. And that is why the punishments are not severe.

There are many issues involved with this topic besides protecting copyrights. It involves a common desire of many to share materials. There is also the freedom to share different kinds of legal information by a large number of people on the internet and people not wanting excessive restrictions on their freedoms. How these competing interests are balanced will never be easy imo.

I just wish they would permaban users who upload content known to be copyrighted. I've lost count of how many takedown notices we've had to file against them for my wife's books. and most of those uploaded included the copyright notice in the upload, not like it wasn't obvious that the work was not under copyright. There's no way they can say "I didn't know".

I'm all for common carriers having the protection they do, I just wish they would hold their users more accountable for their actions, instead of the current 'slap on wrist, "don't let us catch you doing that again" <wink nod>' approach most of them seem to currently employ.

The problem with 'reasonable sharing' is that what is reasonable varies widely depending on the perspective. For an author that is putting in thousands of hours to research and write a book, reasonable is getting paid their royalties. For a teenager with a 'gotta get em all' mentality and no budget, reasonable is 'free'. To someone who actually needs to read the work, reasonable might be a e-version that's discounted to like half the price of a dead-tree edition.

For most authors I know, 'reasonable' is sharing something with one or two close friends (as you would a physical book) so they can decide if they like the work or the author, and might perhaps buy their own copy. it's not 'put it up on the internet for anyone to download for free'.

If an author or publisher wants to put their book up for free on their own site, that's their right. For authors with a bunch of books, that can work out pretty well (e.g. Baen free library).. but it's harder to convince an author with just a single book so far to just give it away in the hopes it might increase sales. But in either case that decision should rest in the hands of the author/publisher, not some random torrent user

Right, because it's not like people would ever upload a file to USENET or one of the sites like Rapid Share for their own use when they are on the road. It must automagically be for the evil piracy.

BTW you do realize that Rapid Share is not in any way, shape, or form a torrent site?

Several musicians who distribute their music freely throw up the album as a .zip on Rapidshare/Megaupload. Similar file services are the first thing I go to when I want to move 200 megs from one computer to another quickly and easily. I'm not quite sure why they're not more commonly used for useful work.

At any rate, other filehosting services are displacing Rapidshare among the piracy community due to slow download speeds, file download limits, and other limitations.

And a million porn fans breathed a sigh of relief. Seriously though I can't think of any time that I've seen a legit Rapidshare since I heard of the site several years ago. All of them have been porn or warez or similar.

Seriously most filters are indeed a double edged sword. They are just as prone to false positives as anti-virus solutions, only worse because a lot of those don't have constant updates. Even better is clever people can just as easy find ways around the filter that makes it:

1. Pointless

2. A money drain for the company thats forced to implement it.

Yes I know corporations use filters on their networks, but interesting fact. Even though most users are dumb as bricks, there are some who not only will find ways around the filter, but will make it hard to identify that they are doing so.

Your confusion stems entirely from your misguided belief that copyright is an entitlement.

Um.. it is. Even if you don't register, any work you create is under a de facto copyright.

FWIW if you want the ability to go after someone in court to try and get monetary damages you need to register your copyright with the Library of Congress. At least that's what I hear on a lot of the photography podcasts I listen to.

Edit: I should say it's not required but according to Scott Bourne (and a couple other pro photographers I've heard the same from) every time he's ended up in court over a copyright infringement as soon as the judge asked if he had registered their copyright immediately sided with them upon seeing the registration documents. It may not be required to register your copyright but if you make money off it it doesn't make sense not to.

As snarky and self-serving as it is, I'm glad this ruling was made for personal piracy purposes. There are a number of things (specifically GBA games for my emulator) that are hard to find in torrents and almost impossible to download through other websites (I always use Rapidshare and Megaupload for them) without getting a ton of spyware and viruses dropped on my computer. I figure that if someone's going to go through the trouble to pirate something, it would at least be better if they didn't become part of a botnet.

Like it or not, there's plenty of copyrighted material available on Rapidshare and Megaupload that the copyright holders simply don't care enough about to send takedown notices for. Since these are usually older items (sometimes very old indeed), the torrents for them may have died long ago. That leaves these sites or Usenet, assuming that the Usenet posts that contained those downloads have been archived or resurrected. So for items that are now hard or expensive to obtain through any other means, including legal means, those sites are awesome.

Small-time copyright holders will be screwed by piracy no matter what measures are taken because there's no way to fully stop it - there will always be a fairly popular source of pirated copyrighted material. Writers are pretty safe, however, unless the electronic copy is e-book-reader-ready (or there's a converter for it)...and even then, not that many people use those AFAIK. I can't stand reading electronic copies of a book, and I know I'm far from the only one, especially since it costs quite a bit if I were to just print the pages out (and that makes them unwieldy). Most indie game developers accept piracy as a fact of life and just institute the bare minimum of DRM to slightly discourage casual piracy, while small-time musicians are often safe simply because they're obscure and most of their album sales will come directly from the concerts they play.